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Small Player in the Great Game

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah . . . hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot . . . There was some justification for Kim . . . since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference . . . Kim was white – a poor white of the very poorest.

As I read those lines the familiar magic envelops me. Kim is the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece, for many one of the best books about India ever written. It’s a strange, oddly constructed book intended for children, with no proper villain, that even its author said was ‘plotless’ but which I have always found mesmerizing.

When I was a child, locked into the English school system, the only person I wanted to be was Kim. His life in Lahore was everything mine was not. ‘Kim did nothing with an immense success . . . was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was “Little Friend of All the World”.’ Even better, I thought, he was an orphan, living his own life, unhampered by the tedious entanglements of family. He was free.

Though it was not published until 1901, Kipling wrote Kim in 1892, a time when the confrontation between Russia and England on the Indian North West Frontier, which he called the Great Game, was at its height. Kim – Kimball O’Hara – is a 13-year-old orphan living in Lahore. His father, a soldier in an Irish regiment, had le

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He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah . . . hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot . . . There was some justification for Kim . . . since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference . . . Kim was white – a poor white of the very poorest.
As I read those lines the familiar magic envelops me. Kim is the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece, for many one of the best books about India ever written. It’s a strange, oddly constructed book intended for children, with no proper villain, that even its author said was ‘plotless’ but which I have always found mesmerizing. When I was a child, locked into the English school system, the only person I wanted to be was Kim. His life in Lahore was everything mine was not. ‘Kim did nothing with an immense success . . . was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was “Little Friend of All the World”.’ Even better, I thought, he was an orphan, living his own life, unhampered by the tedious entanglements of family. He was free. Though it was not published until 1901, Kipling wrote Kim in 1892, a time when the confrontation between Russia and England on the Indian North West Frontier, which he called the Great Game, was at its height. Kim – Kimball O’Hara – is a 13-year-old orphan living in Lahore. His father, a soldier in an Irish regiment, had left Kim in the care of the half-caste woman ‘who pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait’. She was an opium addict and so Kim brought himself up on the streets, speaking English badly and thinking in Hindustani. No one knows he is a white boy, a sahib. He’s intelligent, quick-witted, loyal, resourceful and brave. Able to go anywhere and pass as Muslim or Hindu, he lives by begging and by running dangerous secret errands for Mahbub Ali, an Afghan Muslim horse-trader and a spy for the English. One day Kim befriends a Tibetan lama and, looking for adventure and new experiences, becomes the lama’s disciple. Together they go on a quest: the lama is searching for the legendary Sacred River of Healing that sprang up where the Buddha’s arrow fell, while Mahbub Ali gives Kim a secret package to take to a certain Colonel Creighton in Umballa – this is the boy’s first, unknowing involvement in the Great Game. Kim cares for the lama and begs for him, guarding him from ‘the crows who would have picked your bones clean before you left Lahore’. By chance, they fall in with Kim’s father’s old regiment and the authorities determine to turn the boy into a very reluctant Christian sahib. The seemingly penniless lama pays for him to go to the best school in India. Then Mahbub Ali convinces Colonel Creighton, who turns out to be the spymaster for this part of India, that Kim would be a natural player in the Great Game. So, trained in disguise and field craft by Lurgan Sahib, the mysterious and sinister Healer of Sick Pearls in Simla, he leaves school early to go on the road with the lama again and cut his teeth in the Great Game. Eventually he and the lama get as far as the Himalayas where he and another player, a Bengali babu, foil two Russian spies. This summary does scant justice to the book, as well as giving the impression that it is about a boy’s transition from an Indian childhood to English manhood via Anglo-Indian institutions. It is, but it is also the story of a double quest – the lama for his river, Kim for himself. What gives it its unique flavour is not the action but the vivid word pictures of the characters he meets along the way and the descriptive narrative that gives an almost physical sense of actually being in India, of being part of that kaleidoscope of warmth, colour, energy, dust and smells, noise and overwhelming polyglot crowds. Kim and the lama walk the Grand Trunk Road that traverses northern India. The lama never lifts his eyes to the throng but Kim is delighted by the sight of new people at every stride, ‘castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience . . . life as he would have it, bustling and shouting, the beating of bullocks and the creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food . . . India was awake and Kim was in the middle of it.’ This is India both of the imagination and of reality, even now. The lama is forever telling Kim that ‘this terrible world’ is an illusion and the sooner everyone is free of it, the better. But while Kim has moments of existential doubt when he ponders who he is, white man or Indian, sahib or disciple, and where he fits into the vast universe, in the end his strength comes from being part of ‘this great and beautiful land’ There are many journeys, by train, by bullock cart or on foot, and each new place is so vividly described that you, the reader, are there too. ‘Kim will remember till he dies that long and lazy journey from Umballa up to Simla . . . the wandering road, climbing, dipping and sweeping about the growing spurs; the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the voices of a thousand water channels, the chatter of the monkeys, the solemn deodars climbing one after another with down-drooping branches, the vista of the plains rolled out far beneath them.’ Kim is Kipling’s love song to India, the land and the people. Kipling has been endlessly criticized as a racist apologist for Empire. Edward Said, author of Orientalism, described Kim as ‘profoundly embarrassing’ and thought it an image of an exotic, obedient, changeless India invented for the pleasure of the West. Certainly no one would any longer write ‘even an Oriental with an Oriental’s views of the value of time’ or describe Kim’s astonishment that the lama ‘told the truth to strangers, a thing no native would do’. Kipling was a firm supporter of Empire: in Kim it seems a benign institution, keeping the peace for everyone. This was an idealized vision even then, and Kipling needed to avert his eyes from the injustice inherent in the system. However, he loved and respected the complexity of Indian life, its tolerance and warmth. Kim is Kipling at his most generous. Nearly all the characters are treated with affection. Even the Babu, an educated Bengali of a caste that is frequently mocked in his Indian short stories, is described with respect and admiration. This is a book where the ‘native’ point of view is clearly expressed, the Indian characters are more interesting than most of the European ones, and the former frequently criticize their rulers. I think this argues more tolerance and breadth of vision than Kipling is usually allowed. The people for whom he reserved his greatest scorn and contempt were those Europeans who came to India and made no effort to understand the culture or the society, like Bennett, the Church of England chaplain of Kim’s father’s regiment, who looks at the lama ‘with the triple-ringed uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of “heathen”’. Colonel Creighton warns Kim, ‘Do not at any time contemn the black men. I have known boys in the service of the Government who feigned not to understand the talk or customs of black men. Their pay was cut for ignorance. There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.’ What Kipling admired in Empire was the mutual respect of ruler and ruled. On the great road Kim and the lama join forces with the elderly widow of a minor mountain rajah. They meet a white policeman who jokes with the old lady in fluent Urdu and she says, ‘These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence.’ In the end, the lama finds his River of Healing by falling into an irrigation ditch in a trance, and it’s clear that sooner or later Kim must choose between the exciting life of Mahbub Ali and the Great Game, the spiritual path of his guru and his role as a sahib. In Quest for Kim (1996) Peter Hopkirk set out to discover as many as he could of the places Kim and the lama visit as they criss-cross the country. He also searched out the real models for the fictional characters. When Kim is learning spycraft he is taught how to measure distances using the length of his stride or by counting the beads on a rosary. He is being trained to be a ‘pundit’, the élite band of Indian explorers employed by the British to gather intelligence in areas too dangerous for Europeans. Add a Buddhist prayer wheel with a compass in the lid and a thermometer for calculating altitudes, and he is fully equipped. The man who thought up these ingenious gadgets and ran the ‘pundits’ was Colonel Thomas Montgomerie, FRS, of the Survey of India, Hopkirk’s chosen candidate as the model for Colonel Creighton. Kipling had turned the real Survey of India into a fictitious India-wide intelligence service called the Ethnographical Department. A probable match for Mahbub Ali is an actual Afghan horse-dealer of that name. Kipling knew him when he was a young journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette and Ali used to bring him news from untamed Afghanistan beyond the Khyber Pass. Lurgan Sahib, the sinister Healer of Pearls, is based on a real jewel merchant called A. M. Jacob (no one knows what the initials stood for) who claimed to be a Turk but might have been an Armenian or a Polish Jew. Sold into slavery as a child, he was educated by his master and rose to fame and immense wealth (according to his Times obituary), but he died in 1921 in poverty in Mumbai. He had a shop in Simla exactly like Lurgan Sahib’s when Kipling was based there, and used to astonish everyone with his magic tricks and hypnotism. It’s fascinating to see how the real and imagined are woven together in Kim, but I am glad Peter never tracked down the boy himself. That leaves me free to imagine him. On my first working trip to India I filmed in the Tiger Cages, the brothels of Mumbai, and could picture Kim there, perfectly at home, teasing and laughing with the prostitutes. His world still seems very real to me, with its beggars and old soldiers, letter-writers in the bazaars, beautiful women old and young, gentle Jain monks sweeping the ground before them as they walk, merchants and a horse-trader whose thumbprint with an old diagonal scar was known from ‘Balkh to Bombay’. The world has changed since 1901 and so has India. It’s a less tolerant place, but it is still full of energy, dirt, welcoming smiles and breathtaking landscapes. In my mind I can see the Little Friend of All the World embarking fearlessly on an endless journey of discovery across this vast subcontinent, merging chameleon-like into the swirling, vivid river of Indian life. Sometimes I still wish I could be Kim.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Amanda Theunissen 2018


About the contributor

Amanda Theunissen is a television producer with a romantic streak and a hopeless, unfulfilled longing to have lived in strange, exotic places. India is top of the list.

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